ABSTRACT
Western attitudes towards music from elsewhere in the world can be addressed in two ways: by examining how the West studies non-Western cultures and by considering how Western music conveys musics of other cultures. Alan Merriam’s description of ethnomusicology as ‘the study of music in culture’ extends its remit to all music, thereby challenging binary distinctions between ‘normal’ and ‘other’ musics. The problem with this formula is that it implies that music and culture have somehow to be brought together. For this reason, the definition quickly became ‘the study of music as culture’, overcoming any sense of music and culture as separate entities. The study of music as culture is a good depiction of the recent shifts that have taken place in musicology as a whole. The originality that some recent musicology attributes to itself not only dismisses modernism in a generalized fashion, it also passes over the innovatory cultural work that has taken place in ethnomusicology.
